Moran's eyes slid over the pile of flesh and metal in front of him.

That was all that remained of Galadia.

She had been carefully taken apart, piece by piece, along with the strange helmet she’d worn.

They’d learned less than he had hoped, but at least it was something.

He scribbled into his notebook, a collection of brown pages he had kinked and bound together with strips of red fabric.

The writing tools at his disposal were laughably primitive.

The Shapeless hadn’t invented anything remotely close to pencils or fountain pens.

Instead, they wrote by stitching words into fabric or smearing sentences with a sticky, black chalk.

The chalk itself was made by crushing a particular plant and mixing it with a specific kind of dirt.

The result was messy and infuriating.

It took ages to dry enough to avoid smearing, and even then, it sometimes did.

Moran paused, flexing his fingers, now sticky and stained black from the substance. His brow furrowed as he squinted down at his notes.

“Of course, why bother inventing anything better when half your population can punch through trees,” he muttered, scraping a chunk of the chalk from under his nail.

He glanced back at the helmet.

Its surface gleamed faintly in the dim light, the once-intact structure now dismantled to reveal a patchwork of strange mechanisms.

His notebook was filled with crude sketches of Galadia’s body and the helmet she had worn.

Snapping it shut, he stuffed it into a brown bag Aurora had given him and slung it's one hanger over his shoulder.

He quickly cleaned the room.

On the first day of dissecting the corpse, Aurora had stopped caring about him being alone in her "clinic."

Her constant need to leave and heal people, combined with him tagging along and incessantly commenting on everything, had grated on her nerves.

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Letting him work alone had quickly become the lesser evil.

Moran tried his best to keep her clinic clean out of respect and to avoid giving her reasons to berate him over.

He sanitized her tools with fire and alcohol, the latter being an entirely new concept for Aurora.

To her, alcohol was just a drink to dull the mind or temporarily boost one’s aura.

The idea of using it to sterilize tools had clearly never crossed her mind, a glaring testament to how little she truly understood.

Yet did sterilisation really mattered when you were someone who could heal everything not as severe as death within a few seconds. Well almost everything...

Still, over the few days they had worked together, Moran had made an effort to put his dislike for her to rest.

Or at least suppress it.

She was just a person trying to keep a clan of almost suicidal savages alive.

In the handful of house visits she had dragged Moran with her, only one hadn’t been the result of a stunt gone wrong, overly rough training, or the baffling thought process of: “The last five times seasoning my meal with this flower made me sick. Surely the sixth time will be better.”

Suddenly, the woman’s constant frustration made perfect sense.

He would be annyoed as well if he had to remove the same nail out of a kids hand three days in a row.

With the "clinic" back in a presentable state and his things packed, Moran stepped out of the little hut.

He picked up his meal from Ogmar, enduring more of the old woman’s peculiar style of mocking, and made his way to the spot where he and Kai had shared meals before.

Staring at the gathering of Shapeless at the large tree in front of him, he dug into his food.

Moran sat down and unwrapped his food, a chunk of meat baked into a flatbread along with some vegetables.

The construction work had progressed significantly.

The plateau had doubled in size, and two treehouses were already beginning to take shape.

Today, only a single Heartbearer was assisting the two dozen workers, which slowed things down considerably.

Without more people who could jump or fly or teleport up the three, transporting materials to the upper levels couldn’t keep pace with the builders.

As he ate, he pulled out his notebook, flipping it around so the last page became the first, and resumed sketching.

Later, he’d report his admittedly meager findings about the drone to Vestiya and part of the council.

Afterward, he planned to improve the efficiency of their construction work.

He already had an idea.

Scribbling furiously, Moran sketched the concept onto the notebook’s rough, brown pages.

It was an outlandish, almost absurd idea, far more elaborate than simply teaching them to use ropes and counterweights.

But practicality wasn’t his only goal.

He wanted an excuse to experiment further with the Hungry Ocean's water.

There was something fascinating about its properties: incredibly heavy in liquid form, yet evaporating almost instantly once, losing its weight in the blink of an eye.

He was in a strange, foreign world that, more often than not, seemed to disregard the very concepts of science he held dear. Yet, that only fueled his determination.

Moran wanted to uncover its secrets, to prove that even here, the very principles he operated under still applied.

Humans had always found ways to bend the world to their will, to exploit the resources at their disposal, and to harness the forces of the realm they inhabited.

This place would be no exception.

The very though of it made him smile.

He finished his meal, snap the ledger shut and went on his way to meet with the chief.